Cheating in video games has existed almost as long as the games themselves, evolving from a hobby among enthusiasts seeking vulnerabilities into a profitable underground industry dedicated to creating and selling cheats. With competitive gaming now a professional career path, cheating threatens the very integrity of games and their communities. In response, game studios increasingly find themselves in an escalating battle with cheat developers, employing sophisticated tactics to preserve fairness and competitiveness.
At the forefront of this effort is Riot Games, developer of popular online titles such as League of Legends and Valorant. To address rampant cheating, Riot utilizes a kernel-level anti-cheat system called Vanguard, considered one of the most advanced and effective of its kind. Vanguard essentially operates at the deepest levels of a player’s operating system, granting it extraordinary access to detect illicit software and cheating behavior.
Phillip Koskinas, Riot’s head of anti-cheat efforts, views his role with almost missionary zeal, styling himself as an “anti-cheat artisan” whose purpose is singular—removing cheaters from the ranks of legitimate gamers. Under his guidance, Riot’s Vanguard software now bans thousands of Valorant cheaters daily, with notable success. The company estimates that as of early 2025, fewer than one percent of competitive Valorant matches globally involve cheaters.
The secret to Riot’s effectiveness lies not just in its powerful technological approach, but also in understanding and psychologically undermining those who cheat. The Vanguard team employs numerous strategies, including leveraging built-in Windows security features like Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and Secure Boot, and checking driver integrity before games even load. By enforcing such security measures at this fundamental level, Vanguard creates an environment in which cheats become more obvious and easier to detect.
Riot’s approach doesn’t stop at technology; they play a sophisticated psychological game as well. The anti-cheat team’s “reconnaissance arm” maintains undercover identities within cheat development communities, often using subtle infiltration tactics and deliberate leaks of partial anti-cheat data to gain trust and credibility. Once embedded, Riot can silently monitor new cheat development, allowing some products to reach market and attract customers—only to then launch sweeping bans and public humiliations. Koskinas refers to this strategy as a psychological tactic designed to “make them look like fools,” undermining the cheat developers’ claims of providing undetectable software.
Riot also works to strike an intricate balance. The Anti-cheat team deliberately paces their bans rather than rampantly shutting down every cheat instantly. Koskinas acknowledges that aggressive pursuit of every cheat may push cheaters to develop smarter and more elusive methods too quickly. Their strategy is one of containment: allowing limited cheating to persist, making the cheats “dumb” and keeping developers from evolving too rapidly. To tackle determined repeat offenders, Vanguard uses hardware fingerprinting, making it increasingly difficult for banned players to re-enter competitive play using new or different accounts.
Most cheaters, Koskinas notes, fit into two categories. First are “rage cheaters,” typically younger gamers who impulsively use widely available, easily detectible cheats, referred to internally as “download-a-ban” cheats. These users often reoffend repeatedly, effectively trapped in a cycle of continuous banning.
The second, smaller group consists of users employing sophisticated “premium” cheats, often offered with high pricing and limited distribution. These advanced cheats—frequently relying on specialized hardware—pose a more substantial challenge to Vanguard. Examples include direct memory access (DMA) hardware cheats, which copy game data instantaneously to a secondary device for analysis, highlighting enemies and hidden objects. Another sophisticated approach uses hardware “screen readers” combined with algorithm-driven responses, automatically targeting enemies with unnatural accuracy. These cheats, often described as “external cheats,” are extremely challenging to detect, requiring detailed human-like gameplay patterns to avoid suspicion.
Looking to the future, Koskinas admits concerns about artificial intelligence’s potential in the next stage of cheating technology. AI-driven detection and response systems could increasingly confuse detection mechanisms, forcing Vanguard and similar products into ever more complex and rapid development cycles. Yet despite privacy and security concerns around kernel-level access, Riot remains firmly committed to Vanguard’s approach. Koskinas stresses the importance of transparency with the gaming community, acknowledging the sweeping permissions Vanguard requires and pledging openness about the software’s intentions and methods—though not its exact technical secrets.
Ultimately, Riot’s stance reflects a broader industry reality: as long as there are competitive video games, there will always be cheaters eager to pay for unfair advantages. For companies like Riot Games, that reality means an ongoing arms race between cheat providers and developers, fought on both technological and psychological fronts.
